Blog.

I find endlessly fascinating the global milieu of the 19th century. Academic Earth has recently made available an absolutely superb ten lecture course, Darwin’s Legacy. This was a special course organized by Stanford University. Its glue is Dr. William H. Durham, Bing Professor of Anthropological Studies Stanford University. Much is shared by the outstanding group of […]

The National Book Foundation has announced that Civil War historian and Yale history professor David W. Blight will be a judge for the 2009 Nonfiction National Book Award. Blight is “Professor of History at Yale University and author of many books on nineteenth century American history, including A Slave No More, published in 2007.” Finalists […]

Bruno Cabanes, Associate Professor of History at Yale, presents a haunting picture of the impact of the unimaginable loss suffered as a result of World War I in a video lecture at AcademicEarth.com. You can access the lecture here. Mass death was pervasive during the war and many family members struggled to reconcile that loss, often without a […]

Every free minute I get of late, I tune into Steven B. Smith’s outstanding course on Academicearth.org titled Introduction to Political Philosophy. I am re-reading Plato’s The Republic with a version on my Kindle 2 and a regular copy of The Republic of Plato, Allan Bloom’s highly regarded translation. Steven Smith, Alfred Cowles Professor of […]

Two new fiction works have made their way to my library. The March by E. L. Doctorow. This book was required reading for the Yale course by David W. Blight on the Civil War era which I mentioned here. I picked up a nice hardback used and am listening to it on my MP3 via […]

A friend tipped me off on Friday to a EXCEPTIONAL site, AcademicEarth.org, which provides free audio-visual lecture series of some of the world’s best scholars. David W. Blight’s entire Spring 2008 term course, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, is online for free viewing. Professor Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of History […]